The Beach Club Book Summary and Study Guide

Detailed plot synopsis reviews of The Beach Club

The fictional city of Eden Valley, California has a serial rapist in its midst. One spring evening, a 21-year-old toy store cashier is raped in a back storeroom by a knife-wielding subject. Officer Vincent Patrone, Detective Ray Depietro and the rest of the Eden Valley swing shift dubbed “The Beach Club” go after the elusive sexual predator.
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The shift gets its name from the law enforcement slang term “beach time” (which equates to disciplinary time off without pay) because of the amount of officers that have been suspended at one time or another. Patrol Commander Lt. Alex Santos, a headhunting- backstabbing administrator who is pursuing the chief's job, exploits the mishaps of the shift to use to his advantage.

Detective Depietro plunges deeper into the case as the rapist strikes two additional times throughout the week, the last victim being the sister of one of the officers of the shift. Throughout his investigation Depietro notices one common factor in addition to the use of a large hunting knife; the rapist pours liquid substances over the scenes of his attacks to destroy evidence. Depietro seeks any leads in the case that is rapidly gathering victims but no identifiable suspect.

Depietro gets a break when he finds a broken glass jar he believes is associated with the latest attack. He retrieves latent fingerprints from the glass shards and submits them for analysis to the state and FBI crime labs. His efforts pay off when the FBI contacts him with an identification of the fingerprint. Depietro is taken back as the person identified to the fingerprint has a nexus to the police department as well as to Depietro's past.